Trip to the Florida Keys
News, Bad Drivers, Photography ·Sunday March 24, 2013 @ 13:35 EDT (link)
We took a trip to the Florida Keys this weekend, since we'd never been. It was a nice enough experience, but we probably wouldn't do it again. The beaches aren't as nice as the local ones, like Fort de Soto, and it's very touristy, crowded, with all the requisite bad drivers and flim-flam merchants ("SANDAL FACTORY OUTLET!", street vendors hawking crap—I have nothing against street art, just crap), all overpriced and rather tawdry. It's not my kind of vacation and you're not missing much to skip it (and the whole Miami mess, for that matter).
We left Friday evening after I got home from work, and stayed at the Homestead/Miami South Hampton Inn, getting up around 0800 and leaving after the complimentary breakfast. We decided to drive straight through first to spy out the land, all the way to the end of US-1 in Key West. Traffic wasn't too bad, although at points it's down to a single lane and you're at the mercy of the slowest person ahead. The views were beautiful as we drove along, especially when the road curved and it was possible to see beaches and homes on the shore.
We stopped at Higgs Beach in (the town of) Key West (free parking) to get our bearings (and a little earlier at a visitor center to pick up some spam with a few useful maps embedded), and walked around the beach and went into the water for a short while. The Joe Allen Garden Center at the West Martello Tower, maintained by the Key West Garden Club (for donations) was nearby; a real hidden gem and I'm glad we had the chance to go in and walk around a little. I even went back to the car and got my macro lens (105mm AF Micro-Nikkor) to take some better closeups of the various flowers (included above; hover over the picture for navigation/expansion controls; requires Javascript). It was a beautiful day for it, and even without a tripod I was able to get some good shots at f/8 and above.
We stopped for lunch and then drove back along the main highway to Anne's Beach, a small beach a little ways off the road, also rather rocky and with coarse-grained sand like Higgs, so we didn't spend a lot of time; got in the water, swam a little, avoided the seaweed, then continued back. We were on the lookout for key lime pie on the way back, and found Mrs. Mac's Kitchen ("Eat well, laugh often, live long") where we had key lime martinis (I didn't expect them to be so frozen) and I had (my first) slice of key lime pie and Honey had peanut butter pie.
After that we were pretty much headed right back; it was getting late, and we had many miles to go… we got a little snarled up around Miami but got home around 0200 Sunday.
Books finished: Dinosaur Brains, A Fine and Private Place, The Art of Readable Code.
